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Comment by MattPalmer1086 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even sure that a quantum computer has incontrovertibly outperformed a classical one at this time on anything. Some have claimed it, on problems that have no practical utility. Classical results have also been improved on response.

Arguably then the only concrete achievement of quantum computing to date has been improvements to classical algorithms. However, I fully expect that we will eventually have powerful quantum computers.

Practical applications for those are things like modelling chemical reactions or quantum systems, or optimisation.

No discussion on quantum computing would be complete without a link to Scott Aaronson's blog. Worth a read to get a better understanding of the subject.

https://scottaaronson.com/

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The big project is decryption. There is a race to be the first country/agency to be able to decrypt data protected by pre-quantum encryption schemes. It is a very narrow use case but there are very deep pockets funding the race.

Interesting. What are the motivations behind this funding? What is to gain?

As far as i can see there is quite a lot of "quantum safe" encryption so what kind of historical data exists lying around with lots of value?

Maybe whoever will break current state of encryption landscape will also gain privilege to build new and benefit from it?

In my opinion if breaking AES is to serve military (and hunt for secrets) then it would be done in secret.

As I understand it, AES isn't particularly susceptible to quantum computing (similar to classical computing).

Why do you think quantum computing could help break AES?

You can suddenly read all the encrypted emails, web traffic, instant messages and IP phone calls you have captured and stored for the past years (or even decades).

Suppose for a moment that you’ve collected twenty years worth of sensitive but encrypted foreign communications. What kind of advantage can you get by having a peak at it?

Practically, how much real world value is there going to be?

I assume all the big nations spy on each other. Have a very good idea on the broad strokes total number of personnel, planes, ships, bombs, and where they are all located. Potential for novel military insight seems low.

There is probably lots of stupid human gossip to be found: mistresses, politically embarrassing failures, self-dealing schemes, etc. Maybe there are a few tantalizing useful nuggets: attached are the full schematics for the planetary weather control machine, where we buried that crashed ufo, location of the archive holding all the kompromat, etc.

I have no doubt intelligence agencies would decrypt anything and everything, but it seems more like they would just because vs perceived need.

> As far as i can see there is quite a lot of "quantum safe" encryption so what kind of historical data exists lying around with lots of value?

I find this statement funny, not at your expense.

In public discourse, speak about quantum encryption too early – such as within the last five years – and the common opinion on say Stack Overflow/HN/Reddit/among the outer circles of cybersecurity is "don't model a threat before you get there".

Now apparently there is a lot of quantum-safe encryption - not true, NIST barely came to a standard in the last year, which failed quickly, even though there are quantum-resistant strategies which have gained tentative adoption in companies like Signal and MullvadVPN. But interesting that this is a perception someone has now, and suddenly quantum computers are being put under popular scrutiny again, perhaps driven by advancements in inner circles and higher tiers of tech.

It's tiresome to see these discourses out of sync

I think 'quantum safe' needs to be qualified. Most encryption is inherently 'quantum safe' and does not need to be designed specifically to be so.

Most asymmetric encryption is not quantum safe and has to be designed to be so.

Symmetric encryption is safer, but you still need to double the key lengths at least.

The utility of breaking old classically encrypted messages isn't really an existential problem for anyone, and there are no lost great secrets buried in encrypted intercepts that yield disruptive power if they are discovered today or anything like that.

Think of it as a control plane vs. data plane, where you have the state as a control plane, and if data can escape its purview, or worse the data plane can generate control messages that subvert it - you get existential uncertainty and risk. It will never let itself be reduced to a dumb pipe. Encryption represents a limit on the absolute sovereignty of that control plane, so the resources to contain it are a constant need.

Keep in mind that whoever actually gets there is unlikely to talk about it and in fact would keep this ability under wraps and only use it it in extreme cases or where parallel construction can be used to conceal it.

not promising: "For the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years, I'm on leave to work at OpenAI on the theoretical foundations of AI safety."

Yeah true he has been on other things recently.

In the evolutionary sense, the intelligence emerged as, and has always been used as a weapon. Not sure what this can say about its “safety.”

I don't think it's fair to frame intelligence solely in terms of a weapon when one of the single most important underpinnings of intelligence in terms of predator/prey interactions and group survival is "empathy".

It isn’t clear in the first place what a weapon means in evolutionary terms, I mean it is a competitive process, what isn’t a weapon? Plants tremble at the sheep’s ferocious teeth.

not promising as in "blog won't talk about QC anymore" or as in "no trust after being connected to OpenAI/AI safety"?

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